


Dead Men Tell Some Tales

by MagpieWords



Series: AUgust 2020 - Magpiewords [11]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Treasure Hunters, Bruce Banner & Tony Stark Friendship, Civil War (Marvel), Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Honestly everyone is friends, Intern Peter Parker, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark Friendship, James "Rhodey" Rhodes is a Good Bro, Pirate Treasure, Treasure Hunting, archeology, but it's like real casual, like rival archeologists, this is almost an indiana jones parody
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:55:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25944706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagpieWords/pseuds/MagpieWords
Summary: X marks the spot and it's a race to find the treasure in this thrilling adventure of rival archeologists, Dr. Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. They've assembled their teams, now it's time to prove once and for all which one is better.
Series: AUgust 2020 - Magpiewords [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1860265
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6
Collections: AUgust 2020





	Dead Men Tell Some Tales

**Author's Note:**

> I don't love the summary of this one, so if someone has something better, please let me know. Anyway! This was a fun little adventure that become a bit longer than I expected. Definitely want to expand this universe more tbh.

“Dr. Banner, we do not have time for this.”

Dr. Banner unkindly ignored the protests as he stopped to examine the ruins that had been unearthed by the team’s footsteps. “You invited me on this trek for a reason, Dr. Stark.”

That was true, as frustrating as it was to admit. They had barely made it a few miles into the jungles of Costa Rica when Bruce had insisted they stopped. His primary role in this investigation was cultural preservation, though his experience in basic first aid and tolerance for one Tony Stark were additional perks. He was the second person Tony had brought on, right after Dr. James Rhodes, because this trip wasn’t about raiding temples or disturbing populations, despite what the movies made archeology appear to be.

This was not Tony’s first time treasure hunting, but it was his first time doing so off the European continent. He wanted to do this right. He just didn’t realize doing it right would happen so immediately. Having time to linger and document everything was a luxury they didn’t have on this trip.

“Does everyone on this team have a PhD?” Jane Foster had circled back after realizing the party wasn’t close behind her lead anymore.

The quiet clang of an overstuffed backpack announced the arrival of the last member of their group. “Not me!”

“Are we sure bringing an intern on this trip was a good idea?” This was not the first time Rhodey asked that question, and it would not be the last.

“Enough!” Tony shouted, earning a few scattered birds and a very focused glare from Bruce. “Enough,” he repeated, softer. “Parker is an excellent intern and more specifically he’s my student who needs an internship to get the doctorate that, yes,” he nodded to Dr. Foster, “all of us have.”

She frowned at that. “Everyone on this team is in academia?”

“I’m currently a legal professional,” Rhodey offered.

“Okay, actually that’s worse.” Rhodey failed to not look offended by that, but Dr. Foster and Dr. Banner both seemed professional at ignoring people they’d frustrated. She turned her focus to Tony. “Dr. Stark, did you really bring five academics into the jungle without any sort of guide or survivalist? We could die out here.”

“I’m the guide.” Tony raised his prosthetic arm, flipping open a panel on it. “I’m an academic, yes, but in engineering as well as archaeology. I’ve never once lost service to my personal global positioning system because I built the satellites myself.”

Jane still didn’t look pleased. “And surviving? Have any of us even gone camping before?”

“I go camping with my aunt in Montauk every summer!”

“Oh good, the intern goes beach camping,” Rhodey wasn’t even sparing Peter Parker a glance, focusing his anger at Tony directly. “That’ll help us in a rainforest.”

Tony flapped a hand about, quieting the group again. “We don’t need to ‘survive’. We brought food and tents and we’re not going to be out here for longer than four or five days. We’ll be fine.”

“Isn’t that what they say before everything gets bad in the movies?” Bruce smirked up at him, still kneeling over the possible artifact in the dirt.

“Less talking, more science-ing. Is that a piece of local history or not?”

With one last brush of his fingers over the half-unburied stone, Bruce shook his head. “No, but I did find this while you were busy arguing about your terrible plan.”

“It’s not terrible,” Tony grumbled, but took the small piece of metal Bruce handed him. “Oh. Oh! Dr. Banner, this is a very good find!”

There was a flurry of motion as Tony cross referenced their coordinates with those he had mapped out back in his office. That small piece of metal wasn’t an ancient artifact, thankfully, but it was fairly old. Normally, any relic would take a few weeks of lab work to identify and date, but not this one. This was a coin, minted in 1502, and it wasn’t as round as its twin that sat displayed on Tony’s desk, but otherwise it was identical.

“We’re closer than I thought.” He grinned, handing the single coin to Jane for observation, before leading the team deeper into the jungle.

* * *

“Do you have any idea where we’re going?”

“For the last time, Romanoff, this is not the first jungle I’ve raced through.” Of course, Bucky Barnes couldn’t exactly say he’d been to Costa Rica before, but it couldn’t be that much different than Brazil.

“Great, because we’ve ‘raced’ in circles for the last ten minutes.”

“Are you kidding me?” Sam Wilson had neither signed up for, nor dressed for, a muddy jungle hike. He all but collapsed on a fallen tree, trying to wipe the sweat off of his forehead. “Steve, you told me this was going to be a fun beach weekend.”

“It is! The beach is like five miles that way.”

Natasha Romanoff may have signed up for a muddy jungle hike, but she’s pretty sure she didn’t sign up for stupidity. She put her hand on Steve’s wrist, rotating him away from north and to the east. “It’s seven miles.”

“Yeah,” he grinned sheepishly, “that’s what I meant. Anyway, Sam, I promise this’ll be fun.”

There was some rustling in the underbrush, immediately ridding the team of any notion of fun, until a voice called out, “Nat, why’d we stop?”

“Bucky got us lost. I owe you diez mil colones.”

There was laughter echoing through the trees. “Nice!”

“I did not get us lost! Barton, where the hell did you go?”

“Well, you were going off course, so I figured I’d scout ahead.” More rustling, and then Clint Barton appeared from the shadows of the jungle. “Stark is about thirty minutes ahead of us.”

“Stark can do a lot in thirty minutes,” Steve grumbled, scrubbing a hand down his face. “Okay, let’s move out. Clint, you take the lead. Everyone, let’s move double time.”

“What, Stark’s out here? Like, Dr. Tony Stark?”

“Did Steve not tell you?” Natasha asked as she pulled Sam to his feet.

“Steve told me he’d buy me daiquiris all weekend.” Sam shot him a glare. “I was not informed that the man he’s obsessed with was in this jungle with us.”

“I’m not obsessed,” Steve protested as the group moved through the underbrush.

“You’re kind of obsessed, hun.”

“Buck! Don’t agree with her! I thought you were on my side.”

“Okay, obsessed is harsh,” Bucky conceded. “You’re very focused on him though, if that’s a better way to say it. And you have every right to be. Romanoff, I know archeology isn’t your jam–”

“I dabble.”

Bucky frowned. What did that even mean? “Okay, so you understand that what we’re looking for belongs in a museum.”

“Stark would keep it?” She’d only met the man in passing at various charity events and galas, but he didn’t seem like the collector type. Like most proper scholars, everything he owned was a replica or so oversaturated in the museums’ collections that his donation was worth more than the artifact itself.

“Not exactly,” Steve admitted. “Stark’s not a villain here, but he doesn’t understand how valuable this find is.”

Bucky scoffed. “I think he understands that very well. Stuff like this is the source of his family’s fortune.”

“Wait,” Clint stopped moving forward, which brought the rest of the party to a halt. Natasha reached for her gun.

“You see something?” Steve asked, reaching for his weapon too. “There’s jaguars out here.”

“No, if I saw a big cat, I would have shot it already.” 

“Why do you have a gun?” Sam sounded nearly frantic. “Steve, I would have brought a knife if I knew we were going to be fighting jaguars.”

“Sam, I promise, as soon as we find–”

“Why am I even on this trip?”

“We will eventually go to the beach–”

“Steve!”

Steve deflated, despite his massive height. “You’re a professional photographer, the best one I know. We need documentation so the find has legitimacy when Bucky eventually winds up in court with Stark and Rhodes. We need to prove we found it first.”

“And your cell phone doesn’t have a good enough camera?” 

“It really doesn’t,” Bucky admitted.

Steve mumbled something and Sam cupped a hand around his own ear. “What was that? It better be a better excuse for dragging me out here.”

“And you’re my best friend! I wanted you to come because I actually thought it would be fun.”

“I thought I was your best friend?” Bucky and Natasha said, almost in unison.

“Oh for the love of– I can have multiple best friends! But only one rival, who is currently running away with our find!”

“Yeah, actually that was my question,” Clint said. “What exactly are we looking for?”

* * *

It only took three days to find it, but that was more than enough for the entire team to miss sleeping in a bed. It rained through most of their travel, soaking everyone to the core. Except Peter Parker, who didn’t need a doctorate to be smart enough to bring a poncho and rain boots.

“I don’t think I own any boots, actually.” Tony admitted. Even miserable and cold, that managed to learn a laugh from the group.

It was sunny and warm when they found it. A single coin, half buried in the dirt, directing them yet again. “Looks like a squirrel thought this was a snack,” Bruce explained, pointing out the teeth marks denting the ancient and damaged gold.

Tony tapped a few more calculations into his wrist. “If my math is right, and it always is, the treasure of Marco Carbonell is right over here.”

“And I don’t see Rogers anywhere. We might be able to pull this one off, Tones.” Rhodey reached for his notebook as Jane focused her camera. They scavenged the area for a moment, Tony’s arm pinging at loose coins scattered along the ground, before his entire arm shook with the force of finding a large chunk of metal, six feet below the spot they were standing.

“Well, finding the X on the map was easy,” he shrugged. “Digging it up is the hard part.”

“I brought shovels!” Peter offered, rummaging through his pack.

“Told you the intern was good to bring along.” Tony started clearing away the fallen branches around the area, marking it off.

“Uh, Doctor Stark, sir?” Peter continued, even as the team started digging. “I do have a question.”

“Never mind, Rhodey was right, interns are a bad idea.”

Jane laughed. “Ask him, Peter. A good scientist always tries to answer questions.”

Tony rolled his eyes, but motioned for Peter to continue.

“It’s just, you don’t do research out here. None of the Americas are part of your expertise. Why did you come out to Costa Rica?”

Tony wiped his brow, useless as it was, since sweat immediately pooled back in place the second he did. “Great question,” he sounded winded to his own ears, even after a few minutes of shoveling. “I don’t do digs like this and I don’t do digs outside of Europe. That’s why Dr. Banner is here.”

“This is actually my expertise,” Bruce admitted, though he was panting just as much from the strain of moving the mud away from the site.

“Exactly. Almost anything we find here doesn’t belong to us. It doesn’t belong in a museum either, the ancestors of the people who made it should decide what to do with it. Back in Europe, basically everything belongs in a museum and is rarely older than a few centuries. Here, things could go back millennia.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

Tony sighed, planting his shovel in the ground and stepping out of the pitiful six inch trench they’d managed to create. “What’s buried here, these gold coins? They’re from Italy, just over five hundred years ago. They don’t belong here, and frankly museums don’t really need them. Every map and journal and scrap of paper I could find indicates that this is where a pirate hid his treasure.”

Peter stopped moving, dirt falling off of his shovel and back into the dent in the earth. “Like, actual pirate treasure?”

“Actual pirate treasure,” Tony grinned. It felt like a foolish children’s story, and yet it was real. They were standing right above it, he was certain of it.

“If you’re not donating it to a museum, what are you going to do with it?” Jane asked, taking another photograph of the surrounding area. She seemed to be documenting the surrounding flora as much as the expedition.

“Sell it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t act so shocked, Jane.” Tony laughed as he dug back into the earth. This was going to take all day. “Museums don’t need this, you and I both know that. That’s why I don’t have an aircrew doing the hard work for us. Museums will horde this and hide it away in their vaults. It adds nothing to the collective knowledge; you’ve literally seen one of these coins on my desk. Every museum, university, even every corner shop on the continent has one of these old coins lying around.”

“So, what, it’s just for profit?”

“In part. I’m sure you could all use your shares to fund various projects. Brucie and I are already talking about our next trip.” Tony slung an affectionate arm over the other scientist and was immediately shrugged off.

“We’re speculating, and if you ever try to touch me in hundred-degree heat again, I’m going to hit you with this shovel.”

“Fair enough.” He turned back to Jane. “I’m speculating this find is worth anywhere from ten to twenty million euros, just from the gold itself, let alone what collectors would want for the coins in their original form. We say a million for each of us, more than a good haul,” Peter had stopped digging again, looking starstruck as Tony continued. “And the contract you all signed before we started this indicates that fifty percent of whatever we earn from this trip is being donated to local communities at the dig site.”

“Local communities as in…” Jane still wasn’t impressed.

Tony put down the shovel completely, sitting down as he took a long drink from his water bottle. “As in Costa Rica’s people. There’s a few community service teams I had my eye on, a few housing projects that seemed good, but I’m open to suggestions.”

Jane sat next to him, with Rhodey joining on the other side. “Why?”

“Because he’s an idiot that doesn’t know what he’s digging for!” Steve Rogers crashed through the underbrush, nearly tripping into the shallow hole Peter and Bruce were still digging. Shovels were dropped and everyone was on their feet as the rest of Rogers’ team came into the small clearing.

“You’re too late, Rogers.” Despite being several inches shorter, Tony didn’t shy away from strutting into Steve’s space. “We were here first. Jane has everything documented and my lawyer will destroy yours, just like last time.”

Rhodey offered a cheeky wave to Bucky, who nearly growled in return. “You know that unless you’ve seen the item, finding the dig site doesn’t count as ownership.”

“I do know that,” Rhodey agreed, taking a step closer. “I also know I’m not about to let you take our find.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Legally speaking? No, it is not.” Rhodey grinned, wide and dangerous.

“Wait, you’re really going to fight over some dead guy’s gold?” Peter hadn’t left the tiny dirt pit, staring up at the others with the honest confusion only a student could have.

“We’re not going to fight,” Tony said, just as Steve spoke over him. “It’s not just gold!”

Jane stepped forward this time. “Mr. Rogers, I believe we’ve met at a few conferences before. Your work about the First Babylonian Dynasty was groundbreaking. But Dr. Stark is right, no museum needs old European coins.”

Steve pinched the bridge of his nose, frustration pouring off him just like sweat. “And that’s what I tried to contact Dr. Stark about, but he has still blocked my IP address.”

“My lawyer recommended that, actually.”

“Your lawyer is a pompous vulture!” Bucky snarled.

“His lawyer has worked more pro bono cases than all your trials combined, Mr. Barnes.” Rhodey didn’t raise his voice, namely because he didn’t need to.

“Hold on,” Bruce stepped between everyone, hands outstretched that everyone backed away from. Any physical contact in this heat felt like a burning brand. Bruce focused on Steve. “What do you mean, it’s not just gold?”

“Tony wont tell any of you this, but he’s not looking into Carbonell for the sake of academic curiosity.”

“It’s a little for academic curiosity,” Tony tried.

Steve carried on like he hadn’t heard him. “Dr. Stark is a direct descendant of Marco Carbonell. I know this because I am friends with his mother.”

“Ew, please don’t say it like that.”

The smug smirk faded from Steve’s face as he rephrased it. “I won the Maria Stark scholarship and she really went above and beyond as my mentor. The Stark family is the reason I became an archeologist at all.”

“Which we are all so grateful for.” Tony rolled his eyes but Bruce held up a hand again. “But that’s exactly why I want to donate the Carbonell money! He was a pirate, he stole this money from the people of this country and it’s only right to give it back as best we can. The museums won’t do that!”

“Tony, hold on, I want to hear what he has to say.”

“It’s not about what I have to say, it’s about what this says.” Steve fished through his pockets, pulling out a photocopy of an ancient looking letter. “I found this when I helped Maria clean out the attic. I think you were in Barcelona at the time.”

Tony stuck out his tongue and Bruce snatched the document from Steve. “Jane, come take a look at this.”

“A weekend in Barcelona is not a crime,” Tony grumbled as even Rhodey left his side to look over the letter.

“It was more like a month, Tones.”

“Whatever!”

“You’re related to a pirate?” Peter asked what he considered to be the most pressing question after this dramatic reveal, but was steadily ignored.

“Oh,” Jane whispered, taking the note from Bruce to look at it closer. “Steve, you found this an attic?”

“The original is in a museum now, just like what we find buried here should be.”

“Alright, what does the letter say?” Tony asked.

“This isn’t just Marco Carbonell’s fortune.” Jane handed him the letter. “It’s the resting place of his lover.”

“If we can prove that my speculation on the gender of the lover is correct, this would be a huge discovery for queer history.” Steve explained further and Tony bit back a grin. The gold would help communities now, but documentation like that could help communities world wide for a long time to come.

“Tony,” Bruce said, “if we’re dealing with human remains, we need to call in a professional team.”

“Which,” Natasha stepped forward, taking off her pack. It held no tents or rations, and was stuffed to the brim with archeological supplies. She pulled out a roll of barricade tape. “We are qualified for.”

“Steve, you got a bachelor’s then ran off into the desert.” Tony was still clinging to the letter. “Is anyone on your team even a doctoral candidate?”

Steve looked back at his group, checking with each person. “I’m a lawyer, that counts,” Bucky pointed out, but Steve shook his head.

“Alright, Stark, fair enough. We’d need a supervising staff on our excavation team.”

Tony squinted, but nodded slowly. “Looks like we’ll have to work together, Rogers.”

“Looks like.” There was a hint of a smile toying at the edge of Steve’s lips.

“I’ll need you to sign some paperwork about the profits, but for now, I think a gentleman’s agreement will do.” He held out his metal hand and Steve took it, a single, heavy shake passing between them. In that fleeting moment, Sam’s camera flash went off.

“Now, this vacation is finally starting to be fun.”

“We still have to dig it up,” Natasha pointed out, earning a collective groan from the newly formed group.


End file.
